Daniel Woodrell, ‘Country Noir’ Novelist of ‘Winter’s Bone,’ Dies at 72

His tales of violence and squalor in his native Ozarks had the timeless quality of fables and inspired several movies.

Daniel Woodrell, a novelist known for prose as rugged and elemental as the igneous rock of the Ozark Mountains, his birthplace, which he returned to just as his artistic craftsmanship peaked, died on Friday at his home in West Plains, Mo. He was 72.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Katie Estill-Woodrell, said.

Mr. Woodrell was best known for his 2006 novel, “Winter’s Bone,” which became an acclaimed, Oscar-nominated movie four years later. A teenage Jennifer Lawrence starred as Ree Dolly, a girl in rural Missouri whose family home will be seized unless she finds her father, a meth cook on the lam.

Two more of Mr. Woodrell’s novels were adapted as films: “Woe to Live On” (1987), which became “Ride With the Devil” (1999), directed by Ang Lee, and “Tomato Red” (1998), which in 2017 became a movie of the same title starring Julia Garner.

Despite the attention from Hollywood, Mr. Woodrell did not become a public figure himself. Instead, he was an artist admired by close observers of contemporary fiction as a master storyteller of rural America.

In the early 2010s, Esquire described him as “one of American literature’s best-kept secrets,” and The New York Times said that he “writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today.”

Much as Mr. Woodrell was drawn to American archetypes — world-weary policemen, small-town crooks — reviewers continually praised his work for transcending the circumstances of any particular place or time. He gained command of Old Testament diction, and he sought out themes, like clan loyalty or murder or betrayal, used since ancient times.

“He writes high Greek tragedy about low people, and he never panders or looks down on the people he writes about,” the writer Dennis Lehane told Esquire. “As a prose stylist, he’s done what all the best do: taken the regional voice of the world he writes about and turned it into poetry.”

In addition to “Winter’s Bone,” whose plot as a novel resembled its movie adaptation, his other books included “Give Us a Kiss" (1996), which also concerned a search for a missing relative; “The Death of Sweet Mister” (2001), another family tale, told from the point of view of a friendless little boy and focused largely on his poor and abused but alluring mother; and “The Maid’s Version” (2013), inspired by a catastrophic fire in the rural Ozarks of 1929.

Frustrated with labels used to characterize his style, Mr. Woodrell coined one of his own: “country noir.” In a 1994 Times article, he defined this fictional strategy: “To portray the allegedly folksy and bucolic heartland as the frequently rude and savage and dark world those of us who’ve done our time there know it can be is to explode a happy myth of fantasy-America.”

A sampling of the writing that resulted:

A Middle American writer turned criminal reflects, “My imagination is always skulking about in a wrong place.”

A disillusioned old man says about his son: “If I love Cecil now it is like the way I love the Korean conflict. Something terrible I have lived through.”

And the family patriarch of “Winter’s Bone,” Thump Milton, is described as “a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.”

Most of Mr. Woodrell’s early novels concerned St. Bruno, an imaginary town of the Louisiana bayou, and Rene Shade, a Cajun detective in danger of being laid off whose mother runs a pool hall in her dining room.

His “breakthrough,” as the Times Book Review editor Michael Anderson wrote in 2001, was “Give Us a Kiss.” From that novel on, Mr. Woodrell dropped some of the pulpy conventions he had employed, and he committed to setting all of his major work in West Table, a fictional version of West Plains, his hometown, which has a population of about 10,000 and hugs Arkansas’ northern border.

Mr. Woodrell’s inspiration for “Winter’s Bone” arose from visiting his local grocery store. He saw a young woman shopping with children who were clearly not her own, though she exhibited the manner of an impoverished caretaker, scrutinizing each item she picked off the shelves. A tale of a teenage girl forced to protect her family started to bloom in his imagination.

Daniel Stanford Woodrell was born on March 4, 1953, in Springfield, Mo. His mother, Jeananne (Daily) Woodrell, was a registered nurse. His father, Robert, was a wholesale metal dealer.

He grew up in small-town Missouri, but during his teen years his family moved to Kansas City. Dan did not like the change and dropped out of high school to join the Marines at 17.

Instead of being sent to Vietnam, he was stationed in Guam, where he experimented with drugs under the tutelage of older jarheads. He learned he was under investigation and volunteered for a drug amnesty program, escaping with a general discharge.

He took to hitchhiking with his military duffel and landed in Tijuana. As Mr. Woodrell was munching street tacos, a scruffy young man wandered over and offered a deal: His last two tacos in exchange for a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.” Mr. Woodrell, feeling full anyway, agreed.

He read the book feverishly, not sleeping. In Hemingway’s descriptions of becoming a writer, Mr. Woodrell discovered, as he later recalled in an essay in The Atlantic, “a sense of vocation.”

“I needed very much to devote myself to something demanding,” he wrote, “something I would give everything to all the while knowing my everything might not be enough.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Kansas in his late 20s and then got a master’s degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Ms. Estill-Woodrell was a fellow student. They married in 1984 and moved around the West, South and Midwest until the mid-1990s, around the time “Give Us a Kiss” was published, when they settled in West Plains for good. In addition to his wife, Mr. Woodrell is survived by a brother, Ted.

“I came back when I’d had a taste of other places and realized that I would never feel the same sense of connection to any place other than the Ozarks,” Mr. Woodrell told Esquire.

His roots in the area could be traced to the 1840s. When the leaves were down, he could see his mother’s childhood home from his kitchen.

By 2013, his neighbors were a group of young people who let a toddler drink their beer and who occasionally vandalized Mr. Woodrell’s home, Esquire reported.

Mr. Woodrell took a somewhat fatalistic attitude. He told the magazine that the Ozarks were a place to mind your own business, go off the grid, avoid the law, hide. Even meth, he saw, had its use, giving families a profitable line of work in a place with few of them.

He told The Associated Press that he was the last of his family still in West Plains, but he added that he was reluctant to move.

“There are a lot of things you can hear in the air that you can’t read,” he said. “About half the stories are anecdotes I heard around town.”

Related Content